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Linux didn't kill Solaris

Solaris struggles against Linux, but it wasn't Linux that killed Solaris - it was Oracle.

Solaris could stand by its own merit. It was backed by a huge technology company (Sun Microsystems), it had the world's most advanced file system, it had great technology such as DTrace, etc.
It was active and had great community participation through OpenSolaris.

Sun was highly regarded in the technical community due to being a huge supporter of open source. Java, OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenOffice, VirtualBox and lots of other software. Not to mention open source hardware through the OpenSPARC project.

Then Oracle comes a long, buys Sun and manages to fuck every single thing up.

I still wonder from time to time what would've happened if the OpenSolaris code had been released as GPLv3 as some rumors had speculated.
Solaris had some interesting tech in it, but overall it was very hardware-limited. You had to basically buy hardware for it. Linux was already miles ahead of it in that regard.

Any chance Solaris had to shine is long gone. Oracle was just the final nail in the coffin.

The Solaris results are also unusual in that it performs poorly on tests that have nothing to do with the OS. I'd be really curious about performance if benchmarks were compiled by suncc. However, that wouldn't be a fair comparison.